"I mean to model. Not now, but maybe someday when you are in Bangkok. Both of you I think, although there is no way to know until some sketches are actually done or for that matter the beginning of a painting if we even get that far." Then the woman was there kissing the toe of the foot that rested on the seat and made up the phallic arch of a bent leg, and Nawin was looking at them with surprise and envy.
He opened the toilet door and then bent to pick up his bag.
"What are you doing in here? Mister, it's Nongkai. Time to go," said a train officer. Then to reproach a fellow officer who was responsible for the trash he ejaculated, "I thought that you said you checked the toilet. Why was someone still in here?"
"I did," the man responded. "Maybe he flew in through the window."
"Flew in through the window? Is that before or after you checked the toilet?"
"Of course afterwards." Both men laughed.
"I didn't notice that we stopped. I am going now, sorry," said
Nawin as he exited the train and walked out onto the platform.
Then he was out of the tiny train station and walking on a paved rural road not sure where he was going or what he was going toward (a left for a couple kilometers would bring him to the center of Nongkai; to the right, past the border crossing and the Friendship Bridge, were the rural outskirts of Vientiane; and between these destinations, finding nothing worth doing and yet as creature of movement needing to do something, was the human mind—his at any rate); but he did not care.
The couple were obviously gone, evaporated like wintery early morning condensation on windows of hill tribe huts. They were gone as the mucus and saliva that was surely spat on this road by some of yesterday's passengers. This being so, he tossed his hands into the air as though now relinquishing his will to fate and circumstance that could raze elaborate plans as it would half-hearted good intentions like his own. Then he smiled. He recognized that he had achieved what he wanted in part. The primary reason for absconding to the toilet had been to apprehend such philanthropic tendencies; but sexual feelings and desire for intimacies or friendship aside, most of his reason for wanting to continue the association was to help them financially for he understood too well that to be poor and blown in different directions by injustices and random fate was an ineffable wrong.
How the male had caused memories of abuse, desire for love from the former abuser, and a whole hot stream of perverse fantasies to percolate through cracks in the surface veneer of consciousness he did not know. Still there it was—this need for love, this wish to immerse himself, if not into the arms, into sex with another being and surrender to this prevailing attitude that one was nothing without someone. He smiled again for his own peculiarities did not cease to amaze him and he was pleased that neediness did not overtake him completely when it could so easily do so during this difficult period of his life. From telling himself that sorrow was a universal rather than a personal issue these waves of neediness hit the sides of his boat with vehement force but did not capsize it. His need for love, his neediness, was not so great and from this fact that he was secure in the poundings, he found the inundations somewhat titillating. It was a macabre period in his life but one to be survived intact as the distinct individual that he was.